by Jon Sauve
I sat up. Some noise came out of me, a cross between a moan and a death rattle, and blood started flowing down my chin. I reached clumsily for the ax, fumbled it, reached again. My grip was weak, but it was enough for me to get the ax under me, enough to leverage my almost-dead ass back to my feet.
The clerk had Mary by the throat, and was holding her at arm's length. She still had her wood but it was a stubby little piece of shit, and she could barely even reach him with the tip of it.
The clerk was standing perpendicular to me, Mary in his left hand, his right held out as though to block me from attacking him. He kept looking back and forth between us. I would describe his movements as frantic. Just some inexperienced goon, suffering the same mortal terror I had been all night.
Shaun was coming now. I could hear his footsteps behind. I had to end this. I stepped forward, raising the ax, dreading and feeling sick as I did it. Three people killed, all of them technically deserving, but that didn't make it any better.
Before I could deliver the blow to the clerk, who was staring at something behind me with a look of extreme confusion, something grabbed my arm and disrupted the course of the ax. I twisted around, too weak to scream, too tired to be relieved at what I saw.
Elden yanked the ax out of my hands. It was hard to recognize him under all the blood on his face, which seemed to originate from a gash on his scalp. He was in a sorry condition. Both of his shoes were missing and one of his socks, too. Blood had gone sticky on the bare foot, and it was now covered in dirt. His left hand was cradled against his side, twisted into a claw.
Elden grabbed the ax with his good hand halfway up the handle. He went stumbling past me, his primitive eyes glowing in the night. I knew what was about to happen, and I couldn't bring myself to look. Unfortunately, I forgot to block my ears. The sounds the clerk made, and the wet noises that ensued after his voice was silenced, were unforgettable. That's the scale of bad shit, just so you know. If it's really bad, you'll repress it. But if it's bad enough, you'll remember it forever. You will even dream about it.
Mary brushed past me on her way to the side door of the station, which was still open. I followed after a moment, not so much limping now as engaging in a nearly uncontrollable forward lurch.
The threshold of the door, about a quarter inch high, loomed like Everest. I surmounted it, through a great application of will, and joined Mary in the grungy rear passage of the gas station. The give-a-fuckness of the floor cleaner had not extended past the main area of the store. The tiles here were grouted with sticky black grime. The walls were crusted with trails of snot, with old wads of gum, with who knew what else. It was also dark. There was only one living bulb left in the strip of lights above us, and it glowed in a sick, fitful kind of way which suggested it wasn't far from the grave itself.
The hall ended in another door, this one closed, with a bright line of light around it. It undoubtedly led into the public part of the store, the place where the facade reigned supreme. I went to it, passing Mary on the way, and after confirming that it opened inward I put my back into it.
Elden appeared a moment later, soaked in fresh blood. It didn't seem at first that he even knew Mary and I were there, but after shutting the door and wiping his eyes he spoke.
"I didn't know," he said. "About Shaun."
Mary shrugged. "Are you OK?"
Elden shook his head. "No. But Shaun is. And he's out there waiting for us. We have to be careful."
Mary looked over at me, or rather at the door I was blocking. "There's got to be a phone in there."
Elden shook his head again. "No phone. Just radios. But this is a gas station. Someone will come eventually."
"And it won't take them very long to realize something's wrong." Mary was shaking badly. "We just have to wait."
The trifecta of wisdom. It was coming back.
Wait we did, in total silence except for the sound of Mary's chattering teeth.
After a few minutes, I was growing faint. It was like falling asleep; you don't realize it at first, but then you do, and suddenly you're awake again and frustrated. Except this time I didn't actually want to fall asleep. The blood had thoroughly soaked my pant leg. The material could soak up no more. So it started running out all over the floor. I had to keep adjusting my feet so I didn't slip.
I think I might have gone into a half-faint for a while there. I didn't see Elden coming but he was suddenly in front of me.
"Sit down," he said. "Let me see..."
I sat down. The floor was hard, and wet from my blood, but it felt really good. Elden squatted in front of me, handed Mary the ax, and waved her toward the outside door. She went to it, standing sentry.
Elden stuck his fingers in the hole in my pant leg and, very gently, pried at the material until it tore. He looked in through the newly enlarged opening, inspecting the bullet hole. It looked to me like a little volcano sticking out of my leg, leaking blood instead of lava.
"The bleeding is slowing down," he said. "It didn't hit anything major. You'll live. But we have to get you out of here soon."
"But, Shaun," I said.
Elden nodded. "Shaun." His nod turned to a shake. "I don't know if either of you would believe me, but I really didn't know about him. I guess Jeremy must have always had a guy like him in every hunt. A sleeper agent. But I never knew. This is the first one that went so bad."
"Or good."
Elden smiled a little, but it looked unnatural. "I know the kind of guys Jeremy likes. Shaun will be out to have fun, to spread as much blood as possible. He could have had you when you were fighting the clerk, but he stayed back." He looked up and around at the hallway. "I bet he's out there right now. Just waiting. Maybe he's in the store."
I looked at Mary. Clearly Elden's words were not sitting well with her. She was shaking worse than before.
Elden looked back at me. "Did you see if he had a weapon?"
"Machete."
"Great." Elden frowned. "He already kicked my ass once. This guy won't be easy. Not even with the three of us."
"Why didn't he...?"
"Kill me?" Another little smile. "I'm not too proud to run away. Which is what we would do right now, if you weren't... you know."
I did know. Just the bit of force exerted by Elden in tearing the pant leg had set the leg throbbing again. I had a sudden thought, and reached down to feel the back of my leg. No exit wound. The bullet was still in there. I decided it was a good thing; two holes meant twice the blood.
"Does that door open in?" Elden asked.
I nodded.
"Good." He looked around again, and his eyes found a door halfway down the hall. "I'll look for weapons. Stay there."
He went. It turned out that the door led to an office, which are classically devoid of weapons that might stand up to a machete. No phone either. Elden came back with a folding chair. He unfolded it, then came over for me. I was able to stand with his help. The chair felt even better than the floor.
Elden took up my spot at the inner door. He also had with him a ratty shirt he had pilfered from somewhere, which he let flutter down over the blood puddle.
It seemed to me that Mary, by the outside door, was in a more vulnerable position. But one night in the trenches apparently does not give you as much knowledge and prescience as a whole lifetime in them. Elden knew Shaun would come from inside the store, not out, and deliberately put himself in harm's way.
Shaun was in a mood for trickery. First we heard a bit of laughter, coming through the door. Then a series of footsteps, perfectly calibrated to be just barely audible. Then he knocked on the door. The sound, soft as it was, rang all the way down the hall where it hit Mary like a slap in the face. She jumped up, lifting the ax to ward off some imaginary blow.
"Knock, knock," Shaun called through. "Who's there?"
Elden beckoned to Mary, then held a finger to his lips. She understood; come, but quietly. She took off her shoes and glided down the hall.
"It's me," Elde
n said, a little loudly, I guess to mask any sound that Mary might make on accident. She made none, though. She was like a wraith.
"You?" Shaun said, in mock confusion. "Come again?"
"You know who," Elden grunted. "The guy you should have killed when you had the chance."
"I did have a chance, didn't I? As I remember, you acted a hell of a lot nobler than I ever expected. Jeremy said you were his slave. You'd do anything he asked, even kill a baby. His words, not mine."
"I know his words," Elden replied. "He was wrong.”
"He sure was. I guess we all have a bit of humanity in us. It's our one weakness. If you hadn't succumbed to it we'd be laughing all the way to the bar right now, wouldn't we? Just the three of us. But now it'll only be me. Where were we? Oh, yeah, we were talking about how I beat the shit out of you. Weren't expecting me at all, huh? Even when I was coming at you, you hardly reacted. Jeremy said you were a bit slow, too. He was right about that, at least."
Elden frowned. He had that far off look again. The look of detachment. Mary saw it too. She reached out and, after a brief hesitation, she touched his shoulder. He looked over at her. The look of sorrow on his face was a million times more genuine than his smile.
"I understand there's someone bleeding in there," Shaun went on. "I guess you're in a bit of a time crunch, huh? I guess you really want to get out of there. It's too bad I'll kill all of you before you get halfway through the parking lot." He laughed again. "Damn, I'm thirsty. You want anything in there?"
Elden said nothing. Shaun made no effort to conceal his footsteps as he walked away, already whistling to himself. As soon as he was gone Mary was shoving the ax at Elden.
"No," he said. "My wrist. I wouldn't be able to fight him."
Mary looked at me, then.
"Not him either," said Elden. "You have to do it. You have to be strong."
Mary suddenly grew rigid. All the trembling was gone.
"Here," Elden said, stepping away from the door. "If you-"
"You have to come with me," Mary interrupted. "You have to."
Elden smiled, but this time it was real. He let his actions speak for him, opening the door quietly and stepping through ahead of her.
Mary took a deep breath, let it out slowly, and joined him in the light. She looked back as I started to rise from the chair, pleading with her eyes. At first I thought it was a no go, but then I remembered the chair. I grabbed it, folded it, and got it under me like a crutch on my bad side. Elden was gracious enough to wait for me, though the impatience was obvious.
We were in the same hallway as the bathrooms, a little side passage leading off the main area of the store. We could hear Shaun whistling just out of sight, but the echo was such that we couldn't tell whether he was to the left or right.
Elden took the lead, even though he was the only one of us without even the shittiest of weapons. My chair might serve in a pinch, if I could use it without falling over. In other words, it was useless. Really, I shouldn't have been out there at all, but the idea of sitting behind in that dingy hallway was awful in more ways than one.
Elden stopped near the end of the hall. There were a few wire shelves here, holding discounted goods with bright orange stickers on them. I saw one of those nasty little pies, wrapped in wax paper, at an amazing price of fifty cents. A gob of corn syrup sounded phenomenal just then. My mouth started watering. Or maybe that was just more blood.
Elden gestured us against the wall, where the shelves would give us a little bit of cover. Then he stuck his head out to get an idea of where Shaun was.
Poor Elden. If he would have looked right, he would have lived. But he didn't. He looked left. And as soon as he did, the machete blade flashed, blood gushed, and his head toppled to the floor.
Mary screamed. I screamed. Shaun mocked us with a shriek of his own, which turned into laughter as he stepped into the hall. His machete had traveled so swiftly through Elden's neck that there was not a fresh drop of blood on it. And he had apparently cleaned the older stuff off as well. The blade was gleaming. For a moment I thought I could see my reflection in it, a distorted mask of horror.
Mary was already backing away, giving the ax a few feeble swings. I could tell right away that she couldn't ever hope to stand up to Shaun. I had kind of known it already. Me, in the state I was in, had seemingly less hope. And knowing we were absolutely going to die, and accepting it, I felt a reckless anger rise in me.
I moved toward Mary and grabbed her arm. It was probably more the look in my eyes than my grip that stopped her, considering how weak I was. When I turned to Shaun I saw that he had also stopped and was smiling at us, waiting to see what we would do next.
"Look at you," he said. "How cute. I kind of got to admire you, though. You almost made it out, didn't you?"
"We did make it out," I said.
Shaun put a finger to his hear. "What? Huh? You got a mouthful of shit or something?" He laughed. "Alright, here we go..."
He stepped forward. Mary tried breaking away from me but couldn't. Either she was numbed by fear or I had suddenly grown stronger.
I didn't have a plan, per se. More like a frantic train of thought running on multiple tracks, a whole textbook full of possibilities flashing through my mind in a less than a second. A chair and an ax. A fucked ankle and an even more fucked leg. A mouth full of blood and tooth particles, a young woman behind me shaking like an al dente spaghetti noodle.
Okay, now I had a plan. A ridiculous, crazy plan. The main problem wasn't whether we would succeed, it was whether Mary would follow me into it. But I didn't have a choice. As soon as the idea occurred to me, I latched onto it for fear that something better wouldn't come. And when I knew I was going to do it, my body got in tune. More adrenaline. Less pain. And surprisingly, very little fear.
I lifted the chair to chest height and unfolded it so that its feet were sticking out at Shaun and its back piece was digging into my hip. The sight of it gave Shaun pause to laugh. He let the machete drop, and lifted his free hand to wipe the tears from his eyes. An exaggerated kind of act. A homicidal psychopath having fun.
That was my cue, I guess. I lifted the chair over my head, like a helmet whose eye-hole was the gap between seat and back. I reached back to flick Mary on the arm and accidentally hit her chest instead. Call me immature, but that accidental touch gave me a noticeable boost. I was reaching for anything at that point, because I still had a very faint and distant glimmer of hope that we might actually live.
I charged at Shaun. The chair's seat was wide enough to cover my shoulders, so that they were out of his range of attack. I also bent forward, running the chair legs at him like bull horns. He reacted with the speed I expected from him, but if you see a fucking loon running at you with a chair over his head there isn't much you can do at first.
I slammed into him just before he could gear up for a machete swing. The two legs on the left missed, but his machete arm went between them, which was good. The other legs hit him dead on, one in the nipple and one somewhere in the kidney region. I was a dead weight freight train, falling forward with the heft of a man with nothing to lose.
Shaun's breath blasted out of him. He flew back, out into the main part of the store. At some point he crossed over the boundary between crusty floor and waxed floor. He danced in place for a second, then fell on his ass. I was still coming, but I had the chair down at hip level again. This time the top left leg jammed into his eye. The guy had deep eye sockets. It slotted right in there.
He swung the machete half blind. It hit my leg, and at first I thought the lack of pain was because he had severed a nerve, but it turned out the blade had twisted and only the dull back edge had hit me.
I had the upper hand, but it would only last a few seconds, then Shaun would kill me. It all depended on Mary, and whether or not she had been moved by the same hopeless rage.
I used my brief moment of victory to look behind me. Mary was coming. Her face was red. Her hair was flying behind her.
It was the most beautiful thing I have ever seen.
Back to Shaun. I had to give Mary a chance to end him. I jammed the chair to the right; the leg slipped past his eye and the bottom of the seat slammed into his forehead. I pushed with all my weight. But Shaun's machete arm was still free.
I took a gamble, lifting my left foot to try and pin that hand. I fell. Not surprising. But it all worked out anyway, because my knee went down on his wrist instead.
Mary came flying past me, skidding on the waxed floor with her arms wind-milling. She went past Shaun, then fell to the floor to brake herself.
"Get him!" My voice. I still wasn't used to hearing it, especially in the form of yelling commands at relative strangers.
Mary got him. She stood up and swung the ax under the chair, where Shaun was still struggling to free his trapped head. The ax moved like a pendulum, in slow motion to my eye. I heard a wet splat, the sound of a watermelon falling from a great height.
Shaun went totally limp and still for a second, then started twitching. I started to get up, aiming to get as far away from the carnage as possible, but my total lack of strength and comparative lack of blood caught back up to me and I fell onto the chair. What remained of Shaun's head kept drumming against the underside of the seat as I sat there, waiting for it to stop.
It did, eventually, but it took a good two or three minutes. In the meantime, I couldn't stop staring at Elden, at the way his neck just ended. The cut was surgically clean; the end of his neck stump looked like a circular slice of ham. And the image of it was reflected in the oval pool of blood that extended in front of it. Some sprays of blood had even reached the shelf five or six feet behind me.
At some point I fell into a half-conscious daze. Shaun was motionless under me. Every time I shifted, the chair hydroplaned a little on the blood beneath it. My ankle was numb and buzzing with static. My toes were cold. My leg ached. My mouth felt like absolute hell. That was the worst by far. I was already dreading the dentist appointments.
